excerpts from the book

Information War

American Propaganda, Free Speech
and Opinion Control since 9-11

by Nancy Snow

Seven Stories Press, 2003

p14
Walter Lippmann

"The public must be put in its place...so
that each of us can live free of the trampling and the roar of
a bewildered herd."

p19
1960s anti-war poster

"War is good for business. Invest
your son."

p22
In a controlled society, propaganda is obvious and reluctantly
tolerated for fear of the negative consequences. In an open society,
such as the United States, the hidden and integrated nature of
the propaganda best convinces people that they are not being manipulated.

p23
"Un-American" is a favorite name-calling device to stain
the reputation of someone who disagrees with official policies
and positions. It conjures up old red-baiting techniques that
stifle free speech and dissent on public issues. It creates a
chilling effect on people to stop testing the waters of our democratic
right to question the motives of our government.

p31
As long as we continue to allow the media to function as a manipulative
mind manager without fear or disfavor, we'll continue to see the
brain-numbing effects of a society underexposed to real information
and analysis, rendered incapable of critical judgment and social
resistance.

p31
The public's dilemma is to know how to consume the news with an
ability to extract opinion from the simple facts and evidence...
The best solution to the fact/opinion dilemma is to acquire more
diverse information across the ideological and geological divide.
If you find yourself relying on one source of information for
the news, whether right or left, you are likely to be exposed
to more opinion that reinforces rather than challenges your own.

p32
Walter Lippmann, considered the father of modern American journalism,
was also a writer of propaganda leaflets during World War I. He
saw how easily people could fall for lies small and big, particularly
captured prisoners of war who were easily manipulated by their
captors. Lippmann became so disillusioned by the public's inability
to analyze policy that he wrote The Phantom Public, in which he
basically claimed that the public had no role to play in addressing
important questions of state because the media system created
a pseudoreality of stereotypes and emotional impressions along
with facts. The public is easily manipulated, not because we're
necessarily dumb, but because we're ignorant. We don't have the
necessary tools to counter propaganda.

p33
Much of our media now are so image-rich and content-poor that
they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and
short-circuit our impulses. The propaganda and advertising industries
therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries.
They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think,
and increasing numbers of people seem to accept and follow the
cues without question.

p37
Censorship ends the free flow of information so essential for
democracy and makes dissent less likely. Propaganda injects false
or misleading information into the media in order to influence
the behavior of populations here and abroad... News organizations
often willingly collude with efforts to censor because media owners
are members of the political elite themselves and therefore share
the goals and outcomes of government leaders.

p39
Since World War I, the United States has borrowed and adapted
many of the methods of British political intelligence that were
first developed by the English aristocracy to manage its global
empire. Most of our secrecy classification system in the United
States is based on the British model. Britain has also long been
a master of propaganda and deception. The British authors Phillip
Knightly and Philip Taylor have shown in their work how the British
propaganda machine of World War I inspired later efforts by the
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Interestingly, Britain,
with its Official Secrets Act, has never shared the American traditional
ideals about the freedom of the press and the public's right to
know. Nevertheless, the steady erosion of these ideals in the
United States can be traced in part to the special relationship
and mutual admiration between the United States and Great Britain.

p40
... propaganda can be more easily injected into news from the
inside than from the outside. Using CIA documents, the American
reporter Carl Bernstein was able to identify more than 400 American
journalists who secretly carried out CIA assignments over a twenty-five-year
period between 1945 and 1970. Among media executives who cooperated
with the CIA were the president of CBS, William Paley, Henry Luce
of Time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, and James
Copley of the Copley News Service. The most valued CIA assets
were the New York Times, CBS, and Time, Inc. The New York Times
alone provided cover to the CIA for at least ten operatives between
1950 and 1966. Bernstein found that those journalists who played
along with the CIA by signing secrecy agreements were most likely
to succeed in their careers because the CIA connection gave them
access to the best stories. The journalists and their CIA handlers
often shared the same educational background and the same ideal
that both were serving the national-security interests of the
United States. Included in the many examples of the intelligence
community/media revolving door are: (1) the former CIA director
Richard Helms (mid-1960s to early 1970s) was once a UPI wire service
correspondent. (2) William Casey, the CIA director under Ronald
Reagan was once chief counsel and a board member at CapCities,
which absorbed ABC News in Reagan's second term. (3) Two prominent
journalists, Edward R. Murrow and Carl Rowan, served as directors
of the U.S. Information Agency under Kennedy, while the NBC Nightly
News reporter John Chancellor was director of the government international
propaganda radio service, Voice of America, under L. B. Johnson.
(4) The first deputy director of the NSA, Joseph H. Ream, had
previously worked as executive vice president of CBS, and after
NSA, he returned to CBS without disclosing his association with
the supersecretive agency. (5} Perhaps best known is the World
War I propaganda apparatus known as the Committee on Public Information
chaired by the progressive journalist George Creel with the assistance
of Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times of London and the Daily
Mail, and a central figure in the massive British propaganda effort
of World War I.

The point to be made is that the intelligence
and media communities are and have been closely affiliated with
each other. What such collusion leads to is censorship, such as
when Arthur Sulzberger prevented his reporter Sydney Gruson from
covering the United States-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan
government in 1954 at the direct request of Sulzberger's good
friend Allen Dulles.

The pattern was set early in his administration:
leak a scare story about foreign enemies, grab the headlines.
If, much later, reporters poke holes in the cover story, so what?
The truth will receive far less attention than the original lie,
and by then another round of falsehoods will be dominating the
headlines.

p46
The Tyndall Report by the media analyst Andrew Tyndall analyzed
414 stories on Iraq from the Major Three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) between
September 2002 and February 2003 and found that all but 34 stories
originated at three government agencies-The White House, the Pentagon,
and the State Department.

... According to the Tyndall Report, of
574 stories about Iraq on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news aired
between Bush's address to the United Nations on September 12,
2002, and March 7, 2003, just 12 stories dealt with the aftermath
of the war with Iraq.

p47
The American newsroom ... lacks diversity not only in ethnic,
racial, and gender categories, but perhaps more important, a lack
of diversity in upbringing and outlook... This attitude creates
a bias born of class, race, and socioeconomic heritage.

p47
James Carey, a scholar at Columbia University and author of Television
and the Press

"There is a bit of a reformer in
anyone who enters journalism. And reformers are always going to
make conservatives uncomfortable ... because conservatives, by
and large, want to preserve the status quo."

p48
In the federal government, the largest public-relations division
is inside the Pentagon, where government public-relations specialists
provide M-F feeds to the national media.

p50
It was 1917. Creel, an American journalist and editor and, more
importantly, an F.O.W. (Friend of Woodrow), convinced President
Wilson that what the country needed was not a Committee on Censorship
to control the mind of the overwhelmingly pacifistic and apathetic
American public's entry into World War I. No indeed, George Creel
had the clever idea then to create a Committee on Public Information
"for the production and dissemination as widely as possible
of the truth about America's participation in the war." The
CPI was an ad hoc committee whose membership included the leading
persuasion and propaganda experts of the day, the avowed dean
of American journalism, Walter Lippmann, and Edward Bernays, the
grandfather of American public relations. But it was George Creel,
that early George, who commanded the spotlight and knew that to
win the Great War, he had to convince the American people, like
George number 43 does in the first war of the twenty-first century,
that this war was a fight over ideas and values more than a fight
over land, people, and resources. Controlling public opinion was
a major force during World War I as it was to become in World
War II and now in the War on Terror. The issues of the day would
be fought in the media and mental mindfields of men and women
as well as on the minefields of battle. Creel wrote of his mission:

In no degree was the Committee an agency
of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis
throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it
seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited
the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to
last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition,
a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures
in advertising...We did not call it propaganda, for that word,
in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption.
Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we
had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument
was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the
facts.

What does George Creel teach us now about
the War on Terrorism? In order to win the information war then,
the administration, through Creel's Committee, had to convince
the population that the Great War was not the war of the Wilson
administration, but rather a war of one hundred million people:
"What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate
belief in the justice of America's cause that moulds the people
of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct of fraternity,
devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will,
the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which
each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and
consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service
and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business
was the nation's business, and every task a common task for a
single purpose."

To George Creel, the peace and labor movements
of the early twentieth century created unacceptable conditions
for generating a mass warmaking mindset. To turn a pacifist and
neutral populace into one white-hot mass instinct, Creel made
the Committee a totally integrative enterprise, with "no
part of the Great War machinery that we did not touch, no medium
of appeal that we did not employ." This included print, radio,
motion pictures, telegraph, and cable messages and worldwide circulation
of President Wilson's official addresses from Teheran to Tokyo,
posters, and signboards, along with a volunteer service corps
of 75,000 speakers known as the Four-Minute Men, who worked in
5,200 communities and made a total of 755,190 speeches, with "every
one having the carry of shrapnel."

The Committee on Public Information was
in the business of mobilizing world public opinion in support
of American participation in the war. By the time of World War
II, the United States government and military institutions were
fully engaged in an all-out information war that built upon the
efforts put forth by the ambitious George Creel.

The Bush administration's war on terror
is in the same business of mobilizing mass public opinion both
here and abroad.

p53
In the early months of the October 2001 ground offensive in Afghanistan,
the propaganda war began to heat up and the truth about war was,
in fact, becoming its first casualty. The public diplomacy section
of the U.S. State Department, under the leadership of Charlotte
Beers, was beginning its global task of reshaping the image of
America through international diplomatic efforts. Beers, a former
Madison Avenue advertising executive, was assigned the most ambitious
branding assignment of her life-repackaging America's image so
to "sell" the war against terrorism to the Islamic world.

p56
The information war on opinion and free speech intensified with
the creation of several post-9/11 nonprofit organizations. These
included Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), whose intention
is to "take their task to those groups and individuals who
fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing."
Among those targeted by AVOT were Congressman Dennis Kucinich,
chair of the Progressive Caucus and his cochair, Congresswoman
Barbara Lee; Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine; and Robert
Kuttner, editor of The American Prospect. AVOT's work followed
from the work of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA),
which issued a November 2001 report, "Defending Civilization:
How Our Universities are Failing America," that condemned
dissident anti-war language propagated by liberal professors on
American college campuses. The co-founder of Empower America,
one of the wealthiest of the right-wing Washington, D.C., think
tanks and former Secretary of Education under President George
Bush, Sr. (George 41) William Bennett, has said, "We do not
wish to silence people, " and added that AVOT plans to hold
teach-ins and public education events, particularly on college
campuses. Both organizations are united in their belief that the
United States must retain its superpower empire for global goodness
and redemption, keep military ethics and power the primary focus
of the United States response to 9/11, and shout down the "morally
coward liberals" on American university campuses and in Europe.

p61
Propaganda is defined as any organized or concerted group effort
or movement to spread a particular doctrine or a system of doctrines
or principles.

p61
Three important characteristics of propaganda are that ( l ) it
is intentional and purposeful, designed to incite a particular
reaction or action in the target audience; (2) it is advantageous
to the propagandist or sender which is why advertising, public
relations, and political campaigns are considered forms of propaganda;
and (3) it is usually one-way and informational (as in a mass
media campaign), as opposed to two-way and interactive communication.

p61
President George W. Bush became an effective commander-in-chief
of propaganda because of his ability to frame the war on terrorism
in vivid and simplistic either/or terms. "The propagandist
strives for simplicity and vividness, coupled with speed and broad
impact. He stimulates popular emotional drives...in so doing,
he must for the most part bypass factual discussion and debate
of any sort." [Alfred McClung Lee, How to Understand Propaganda,
1952]

p63
The message to the American public is to simply define the problem
as an attack on freedom, to present a simplified, readily understood
case that "terrorist parasites" want to destroy freedom
and democracy. To support the case, an effective propagandist
wants to make sure that the case includes plenty of omnibus phrases
and symbols-American flags, U.S. Armed Forces, and experts who
can lead us, like the avuncular Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
as well as a suddenly popular wartime President. Omnibus words
such as "freedom" and "liberty" are the shorthand
symbols of the propagandists-they carry vague general meanings
that arouse
emotions (fear or hate of our enemy, pride in one's own leadership,
in our armed forces). These symbols provide a shorthand dictionary
for the conflict. So when you are asked why we fight, you can
answer quickly and with a moral imperative: "We fight to
defend freedom."

p64
... the 9/11 attacks were packaged as our generation's Pearl Harbor
and the United States invasions and occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq as Operations Defending Democracy, Liberty, and Freedom-all
of which evokes positive emotional reactions in majorities of
people. This leaves little wiggle room for someone to be against
the war, because what does being against the war then mean? You
don't support freedom, liberty, or democracy? President Bush quickly
succeeded in defining the parameters of our national dialogue
in the war on terrorism when he said, "Either you are against
us or you are with us." He wasn't talking just to the terrorist
"parasites" but also to the American people ...

p64
"I think this conflict is going to require a suspension of
freedom and rights unlike anything we have seen, at least since
World War II, " said Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary
to Bush, Sr., in the New York Times of October 7, 2001.

p66
Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public
[The public is] "a mere phantom. It is an abstraction. The
public must be put in its place so that it may exercise its own
powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us
may live free of the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.''

p67
Bill Bennett is the Director of Empower America, one of the wealthiest
of the right-wing Washington, D.C. think tanks, whose motto is
"ensuring that government actions foster growth, economic
well-being, freedom and individual responsibility." Empower
America is not your typical inside-the Beltway think tank that
issues annual reports or occasional policy statements known as
white papers that go unread on some Congress member's staff assistant's
desk. Empower America is a full-frontal assault organization involved
in changing national policy through active engagement of public
opinion... Empower America's board of directors includes former
Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen, Republican vice presidential
candidate Jack Kemp, and Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations,
Jeane Kirkpatrick. But Bill Bennett serves as Empower America's
omnipresent spokesman. Empower America favors a foreign policy
that rejects "shortsighted isolationism and imprudent multilateralism,"
which could be redefined as advocating international intervention
whenever the United States unilateral interests are at stake.
Bennett, who served as Ronald Reagan's education secretary and
George Bush Sr.'s "drug czar ... joined forces with former
CIA director James Woolsey in the spring of 2002 to found Americans
for Victory over Terrorism f (AVOT) as a sort of public relations
arm of the Bush war on terrorism. A full-page ($128,000 1 AVOT
advertisement in the March 10, 2002 Sunday edition of the New
York Times attacked the radical Islam of the twenty-first century
as an enemy "no less dangerous and no less determined than
the twin menaces of fascism and communism we faced in the 20th
century." But AVOT went further by blasting domestic enemies
"who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate
their agenda of 'blame America first."' In that second flank
attack, AVOT aligned with Lynne Cheney (wife of Vice President
Dick Cheney), who helped to organize the American Council of Trustees
and Alumni (ACTA), whose fall 2001 report, "Defending Civilization:
How Our Universities are Failing America, " citing blame-America-itis
and anti-war bias among hundreds of American professors. The report
included 117 critical quotes from university students and professors
in the early days after 9/11 to show proof that American universities
were the "weak link" in the war on terror.

p71

University professors remain easy targets
for allegedly causing their students to hate the United States
by raising questions about the motives and policies of the government.
To Bennett [Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism]
declarations of war seem to imply cessation of critical thinking,
especially on college campuses:

In short, many in the "peace party"
who cloak their ~ arguments in moral objections to war are really
expressing their hostility to America, and it does the cause of
clarity no good to pretend otherwise. That hostility-in more than
a few cases, hatred is a more accurate word-is many-sided and
has a long history ... But where armed conflict is concerned,
the arguments of today's "peace party" are basically
rooted in the period of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It
was then that the critique of the United States as an imperialist
or 'colonialist' power, wreaking its evil will on the hapless
peoples of the third world, became a kind of slogan on the Left.
This same critique would, in due course, find a home in certain
precincts of the Democratic party, and in more diluted form, would
inform the policy preferences of the Carter and Clinton administrations,
and it is with us still. It is especially prevalent in our institutions
of higher learning.

If you follow Bennett's logic, then America
as a country worth fighting for must include a fight that is absolutist
in language, thought, and action. If you don't absolutely defend
your country, right or wrong, the logical fallacy goes, then you
give aid and comfort to the enemy.

p73
"In retrospect and in balance, the remarkable control of
American consciousness during and after the war [Gulf War I] must
be regarded as a signal achievement of mind management, perhaps
even more impressive than the rapid military victory." Herbert
I. Schiller wrote these words in May 1991 for the French newspaper,
Le Monde Diplomatique, to explain the first Bush administration's
great success in controlling information about the war and American
press acquiescence in withholding information that the public
needed in order to make a sound decision about critical issues
of war and peace. It wasn't until after the Persian Gulf War that
the www.udesen.com press claimed any complicity in its reportage,
as when Tom Wicker of the New York Times reported "the real
and dangerous point is that the Bush administration and the military
were so successful in controlling information about the war [Gulf
War I] they were able to tell the public just about what they
wanted the public to know. Perhaps worse, press and public, largely
acquiesced in the disclosure of only selected information."
That public acquiescence followed from the American people's habits
of media consumption. As Michael Deaver, spin doctor to President
Reagan, gloated in the New York Times, "Television is where
80% of the people get their "information, " and what
was done to control that information in the six weeks of war "couldn't
[have] been better."

A March-April 1991 Columbia Journalism
Review (March-April 1991) survey of Gulf War coverage noted how
much information about domestic dissent against the war was kept
off those television screens. As pointed out by the consumer advocate
and subsequent Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader
in the article, the January 26, 1991, peace march in Washington,
D.C. was "probably the biggest citizen demonstration ever...in
winter," but CBS gave it a four-second mention. Similarly,
a senior House Democrat, Henry Gonzales of Texas, who chaired
the House Banking Committee, sponsored a resolution to impeach
President Bush on the war in Iraq, but this action went unreported
in the broadcast media. Bob Sipschen, Newsweek correspondent in
the Gulf, wrote in the Los Angeles Times March 1991 that "Desert
Storm was really two wars: The Allies against the Iraqis and the
military against the press. I had more guns pointed at me by Americans
and Saudis who were into controlling the press than in all my
years of actual combat."

p75
The United States media were as utterly unconcerned with Iraqi
casualties in 1991 as they would later be unconcerned with Afghan
citizen casualties in fall 2001 and again with Iraqi casualties
in 2003. When asked in March 1991 about the number of Iraqi dead
from United States air and land operations, then General Colin
Powell stated, "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested
in."

p81
In the case of Iraq, slogans and facile statements of freedom
over tyranny from the President seem to satisfy the appetite of
the press, while opposing thought from the grassroots requires
evidence beyond reasonable doubt. Is the lesson of September 11
as simple as this President would have us believe? Why do we as
a nation continue to acquiesce in support of an administration
that gets away with simplifying very complex situations of life
and death? In part, the situation is due to instant bestsellers
like Woodward's Bush at War that promote individual personality
over the social context. He could have written America at War,
a sort of people's history of life after 9/11, but that would
have required more than a two-hour one-on-one with the President
at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. More important, Jacques Ellul
writes in Propaganda, there can be no unanimity of thought without
the steady propaganda of a political chief, "in whom everyone
finds himself, in whom everyone hopes and projects himself, and
for whom everything is possible and permissible."

The President's pet slogan, "war
on terrorism" remains a convenient state tactic to control
public opinion, expand the ' climate of fear, and shut down opposition
to war in Iraq and elsewhere.

p82
Lt. General William Odom (Ret.) U.S. Army said on C-SPAN's Washington
Journal

"Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot
be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare
war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're
not going to win the war on terrorism...

p82
The purpose of such propaganda phrases as "war on terrorism"
and attacking "those who hate freedom" is to paralyze
individual thought as well as to condition people to act as one
mass, as when President Bush attempted to end debate on Iraq by
claiming that the American people were of one voice. The modern
war president removes the individual nature of those who live
in it by forcing us into a uniform state where the complexities
of those we fight are erased. The enemy-terrorism, Iraq, Bin Laden,
Hussein-becomes one threatening category, something to be defeated
and destroyed, so that the public response will be one of reaction
to fear and threat rather than creatively and independently thinking
for oneself. Our best hope for overcoming perpetual thinking about
war and perpetual fear about both real and imagined threats is
to question our leaders and their use of empty slogans that offer
little rationale, explanation or historical context.

p83
The triumph of absolutist rhetoric like terror and freedom or
good and evil impedes our ability to distinguish real threats,
which must be combatted and controlled, from self-serving threats
that reinforce state power and control over public freedom. Nevertheless,
we cannot blame President Bush or the press for our own lack of
initiative in organizing ongoing resistance to such power and
control. Democracy demands constant vigilance.

p85
Secretary of State [Colin] Powell promised, "I'm going to
be bringing people into the public diplomacy function of the department
who are going to change from just selling us in the old USIA way
to really branding foreign policy, branding the department, marketing
the department, marketing American values to the world and not
just putting out pamphlets."

p95
The question remains of whether it is necessary to rebrand the
United States. To many throughout the world, America, already
a brand, a multitrillion-dollar brand of mass consumerism, cultural
and military dominance, led by such worldwide symbols as Marlboro,
McDonald's, Boeing, CocaCola, and General Electric. The selling
of America, even in a new format or packaging, may add to the
global perception that continues to plague the United States.
America, Inc. is presented in glittering generalities of good
freedom and democracy fighting evil tyranny and fanaticism the
world over, but our global audience knows that the reality of
America is quite different from the rhetoric. Despite all the
branding, to many the United States is seen as a violent international
aggressor with a military doctrine of open preemptive strike,
the world's leader in arms trafficking and economic globalization,
an aggressive opponent of the International Criminal Court and
anti-global warming treaties, and a staunch supporter of Israel
throughout its brutal military occupation and collective punishment
of Palestinians. For these reasons, and as long as United States
international interventions favors military solutions over humanitarian
assistance, many parts of the world will continue to be receptive
to the kind of anti-United States sentiment and rhetoric of groups
like the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

p97
... the United States cares most about market share and least
about sharing.

p113
Before the start of World War II, the Institute for Propaganda
Analysis (IPA) was established in the United States by Edward
Filene of Filene's Basement, who, along with other prominent businesspeople
and academics of the day, was frustrated with media manipulations.
IPA was founded in October 1937 "to conduct objective, nonpartisan
studies in the field of propaganda and public opinion...it seeks
to help the intelligent citizen to detect and to analyze propaganda,
by revealing the agencies, techniques, and devices used by the
propagandist." IPA disseminated its research through monthly
bulletins, special reports, adult-education programs, and curricula
for high schools and colleges. IPA disbanded after the United
States entered World War II but left behind many publications
that continue to inform what we know now about how propaganda
influences our thoughts and actions. The organization is most
famous for identifying the seven key propaganda devices most commonly
practiced: (1) Name Calling: associating an idea with a bad label;
(2) Card Stacking: literally "to stack the cards" for
or against an idea by selective use of facts or logic; (3) Bandwagon:
to give the impression that the idea is supported by everyone;
(4) Testimonial: associating a person of some respected authority
(doctor) or visibility (celebrity) with the idea; (5) Plain Folks:
associating an idea's merit with its being "of the people";
(6) Transfer: carrying the prestige or disapproval of something
over to something else such as displaying the American flag as
an emotional transfer device to represent one's patriotism; (7)
Glittering Generality: associating something with a virtue word;
opposite of name-calling (freedom, democracy); often used to make
us accept a concept without thoroughly examining its application.